Can steroids combat population collapse? Enhanced Games wants to know.

The Enhanced Games, a new sporting competition designed to explicitly permit the use of performance-enhancing drugs, look like a techno-macho-era publicity stunt. Olympic athletes using steroids compete for millions of dollars in prize money in Las Vegas. But co-founder Aaron D’Souza is pitching the company to governments struggling with an aging population, with a 90% gross profit margin telemedicine business in mind.

The event, backed by Peter Thiel and opening in May 2026, promises a $1 million reward for breaking the world record. Former Olympians such as sprinter Fred Curley and swimmer Kristian Kolomeev have already registered to compete. The goal isn’t just to break a world record while the fans cheer. It’s about building a marketing engine for a longevity industry that D’Souza believes is worth trillions of dollars.

“We use sports marketing to sell human empowerment products,” D’Souza said in a recent episode of Equity magazine. “This is a telemedicine service like Hims or Roman, but we [will] We have proof that the world’s best and fastest athletes use our protocols. ”

Although the business model is borrowed from Red Bull (extreme sports as a product advertisement), this product is not an energy drink. Testosterone, growth hormone, and whatever else allows humans to compete with machines and remain productive well into our 70s and beyond.

Although the event is considered controversial, D’Souza is betting that the unpleasantness will fade once people see athletes in their 30s and 40s breaking world records. He and billionaire co-founder Christian Angermayer raised “double-digit sums” based on this theory and poached executives from the United States Olympic Committee, Red Bull and FIFA to build what D’Souza calls a mission to “upgrade all of humanity.”

“At that time, Fred [Kerley] break [Usain Bolt’s] “If the 100m world record is achieved in Las Vegas next year, it will be a turning point to show that enhanced humans are better than normal humans,” he said.

Put another way, if Sputnik started the Space Age and ChatGPT started the AI ​​boom, D’Souza believes we can start the era of human enhancement at full speed and spark a similar flood of investment.

Longevity startups raised $8.5 billion in 2024 as interest in life extension moved from fringe obsession to mainstream investment theory. The appeal ranges from billionaires who fund anti-aging research to ordinary Americans who turn to direct-to-consumer health tracking when conventional medicine doesn’t work.

But D’Souza believes longevity is not just a nice-to-have. In the face of an aging population and smarter machines, it is becoming a necessity.

In many parts of the world, falling birth rates are putting major global economies on the path to demographic collapse. A recent McKinsey study found that fertility rates are declining below replacement rates in most regions, except sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries have used immigration to meet the challenges of population aging because immigrants typically arrive at younger working ages, fill critical labor shortages, and tend to have more children.

However, mass immigration is causing a political backlash in Europe and the United States, where right-wing parties are gaining strength by stirring up fears about immigration and national identity. Immigration has been a central issue of President Donald Trump’s term, and D’Souza believes it could propel far-right leaders in countries such as Germany, France and Britain to power.

“When you oppose mass immigration, you end up with a demographic model similar to Japan,” D’Souza said, adding that Japan’s average age (49.8 years) is one of the oldest in the world.

“So how do you reconcile a desire for economic growth with an anti-immigrant stance?” he continued. “Well, the solution has to be longevity and better humanity, because there is no other way. We need a young, working, tax-paying population, but that doesn’t mean we have low birth rates.”

It’s a stark argument that instead of admitting immigrants or expanding social safety nets that could help boost birthrates, we just let people work longer. D’Souza dismissed policy alternatives. Europe has already tried to support families, but they have not been able to increase birth rates, he said.

Given this background, Enhanced Gaming has some predictable backers, including Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. through his VC firm 1789 Ventures. D’Souza describes both as “obsessed with the country’s demographics.” Thiel has poured money into long-running startups, including Retro Bioscience, Unity Biotechnology, and New Limit, which he co-founded with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong in 2021.

Of course, many of the same investors at the convention are betting billions of dollars that artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI that can perform all the intellectual tasks humans can do, will soon do most jobs better than humans. This begs the question, if AGI is coming into play, why bother extending the working years?

“We have Sam. [Altman] “The worldview is that AGI will come along and replace all humans, and then humans will become basically a second-class species because a superior species will be born in the machines. And the inevitable result of that, although Sam won’t admit it, is that humans will… [become] it doesn’t matter. ”

What is the alternative paradigm that D’Souza proposes? Competition between humans and machines.

“Machines are being improved in real time, but human enhancement is being held back, especially because of outdated regulations by the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, so we cannot upgrade fast enough to compete with machines,” he continued. “My goal now is to enable humans to continue to compete with machines.”

However, the problem with this type of framework is that not everyone is necessarily eligible for an upgrade.

D’Souza said the “ubiquity of technology” will lead to a kind of trickle-down reinforcement, with what works for champion athletes becoming treatments for people doing things like CrossFit, and then becoming more suitable for more non-athletes. But the business model of premium telemedicine services sold through elite athletes points to the underlying reality of a strengthening of the wealthy and aging of everyone else.

Mr. D’Souza did not argue when I suggested that enhanced technologies would likely reach the wealthiest people first, and that elites could hoard access to these capabilities.

“I think this is a potentially harmful consequence of human enhancement,” he says.